“Vibe Managers” apparently are generally responsible for making employees feel good about the “vibe” at their workplace. They’re supposed to plan parties and activities like scavenger hunts and other events for the workers, make playlists for office soundtracks, assist in recruiting “talent,” make sure everybody’s birthday is properly recognized, and consider whether the company should offer benefits like lunch-hour yoga and chair massages. The position also might involve more mundane activities, like making sure that the office kitchen and coffee stations are stocked with healthy snacks.

Why, after decades of muddling through without them, do companies suddenly need a “Vibe Manager”? Because surveys apparently show that 70 percent of American workers are not focused on their work and aren’t feeling “engaged.” It’s interesting, too, that the solution to the lack of “focus” and “engagement” is to create a new job designed to make sure that the employer offers non-work activities that some naysayers might consider to be nothing more than frivolous window dressing. Seriously, is a scavenger hunt really going to materially change a disgruntled employee’s perspective on his or her workplace? If so, what does that say about the worker in the first place?

A workplace “vibe” seems to be a lot different from a workplace “culture.” Many of the most successful companies in the history of capitalism have thrived because they established a culture that incorporated core concepts like excellence, teamwork, loyalty, pride, innovation, and quality — all concepts that, unlike a “vibe,” were directly related to, and directly supported, the company’s business activities. Employees embraced and bought into the strong cultures of these successful companies and, so long as they were fairly compensated and evaluated, were satisfied and happy in their work because they felt that they were part of something larger that was doing something worthwhile. It wasn’t office birthday parties that made the difference.

Any company that is worried about something superficial, like its “vibe,” probably isn’t sufficiently attentive to more fundamental issues like culture. And that’s probably going to undercut the efforts to have a cool “vibe” down the road. Anybody who’s ever experienced the “vibe” of a company that is going down the tubes knows what I mean.

Of course, I played Monopoly as a kid. What American kid didn’t? And Life, and Chutes and Ladders, and Risk. They were fun games that everybody had, and a great way to pass the time on a cold and rainy weekend afternoon. And, as I was moving my little tin race car or cannon around the board, trying to purchase selected properties, work out trades to establish my monopolies, build hotels before everyone else did, and then hope that other players would land on my properties and pay me lots of that colorful Monopoly money — especially those rich gold $500 bills — I wasn’t thinking that basic cultural and social training was being drilled into me with every move.

But, of course, it was. Part of the training was just the idea of a game that had rules that you and every other player had to follow, or else the game wouldn’t work. Monopoly players, for example, couldn’t just move their pieces to whichever spot they chose or freely take money from the bank; they had to roll the dice and count out the spaces and pay for houses and hotels to make their properties more valuable and take their medicine if they landed on Boardwalk and accept getting knocked out of the game if their money was gone.

But while kids moving their pieces around the board might not realize it, there was deeper social and cultural training, too, in the sense of what you needed to do to win the game. If you played Monopoly, you wanted to buy property, make the most advantageous trades imaginable even if it meant ruthlessly taking advantage of your kid sister while doing so, accumulate every monopoly, drive other people out of business and into bankruptcy, and have the biggest bank account ever. What better introduction to the American capitalist model of the world than Monopoly? And you learned about the desired behavioral norms in other games, too. In Life, you wanted to get that college degree and land on those pay days. In Chutes and Ladders, you saw that if you landed on a space that showed good behavior, you could climb up the ladder to the top, but if you landed on a space where the kid had broken a window with a baseball, it was down the chute to the bottom. And in Risk, you wanted to build armies in your corner of the world and then have them sweep across other territories until you conquered and dominated the entire globe.

Japan has long had a curious tradition of a slavish work ethic, with some employers measuring employee hours not by productivity — where Japanese workers trail Americans and others — but by raw hours worked, which the employers associate with qualities like loyalty and dedication. So even though Japanese law has instituted a 40-hour work week, it is commonplace for workers to spend far more time than that at the office and on the job, with no governmental limit on how much “overtime” employees can be expected to put in. The social pressure to commit to working crushing hours has even caused the Japanese to coin a word — karoshi — to refer to death from overwork. Every year, hundreds of deaths from heart attacks, strokes, and suicides are attributed to karoshi, and a recent government survey determined that one in five Japanese companies have employees whose tendency to overwork puts them at risk.

It was a recent suicide, of a young employee of an advertising firm, that caused the Japanese government to propose the first-ever limitation on overtime. But those who advocate true reform of the Japanese work culture scoff at a 100-hour-a-month limit as almost as outlandish as having no limit at all, because it means employers could routinely require employees to work more than 60 hours a week. That’s ten hours a day, six days a week — not exactly the kind of restriction that is going to prevent people from suffering the mental and physical health effects of constant overwork.

The Japanese problem with karoshi is an example of how cultures can develop in radically different ways, imposing expectations that would be unimaginable elsewhere. How many countries and cultures have a problem with people routinely working themselves to an early grave? And part of the problem is that there remain thousands of Japanese workers who accept the culture imperative to work like a dog and try to satisfy its demands, rather than just rejecting the unreasonable expectations and going somewhere where the work-life balance is a happier and healthier one. You can impose government regulations, but at a certain level individuals have to stand up for themselves and act in their own best interests — cultural imperatives or not.

Egypt is the latest Middle Eastern country teetering on the brink of chaos. Each day brings fresh reports of battles between the military and the Muslim Brotherhood and dozens of new deaths on the streets of Cairo.

I can’t fully appreciate the religious, political, and social issues that are playing out in Egypt. I can understand, however, what a loss it is for the world that Egypt has become a place that is not safe to visit. It means that many people will never see the Great Pyramid, the Sphinx, or the other relics of the ancient Egyptian civilization along the Nile.

That loss is a terrible tragedy. The Sphinx, the pyramids, and the temples of the pharaonic era are the greatest surviving sites of our ancient past. They are not merely historical sites, but a tangible link to the early development of human culture. Their very existence shows what our forebears were capable of, even if we don’t quite understand how they were built thousands of years ago. Their immense age, and their equally immense significance, are the reasons why standing in their presence on the Giza plain is such an awesome experience, and why so many people, myself included, have long dreamed of making the journey to Egypt to have that experience some day.

But not now. Although the pull of the pyramids and the Valley of the Kings is enormous, it is not irresistible — not when a visit puts you at risk of finding yourself in a mob of angry, screaming men or confronting soldiers ready to fire at any moment. That means, for me at least, that the pyramids and Sphinx are lost for now, and I don’t know when, or even if, they will ever be safe to visit in my lifetime. That reality makes me very sad.